Crackers and Grape Juice

This is a special episode from the "Secret Podcast" we release every other Tuesday as part of our newsletter, Crackers and Grape+ We're making this "Secret Podcast" available so you know what you're missing by not subscribing, but also because it's awesome.

Jacob Smith is a contributor to Mockingbird Ministries and is the rector of Calvary-St. George's Episcopal Church in New York City.

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Our guest is Mandy Smith. Originally from Australia, Mandy Smith is a pastor and author of The Vulnerable Pastor: How Human Limitations Empower Our Ministry (IVP). Her next book, Unfettered: Imagining a Childlike Faith Beyond the Baggage of Western Culture (Brazos), is available for pre-order and will release in 2021. Mandy and her husband, a New Testament professor, live with their family in a little house where the teapot is always warm.

Mandy is the lead pastor at University Christian Church in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Here's her links:

Personal website: thewayistheway.org

Missio Alliance:
http://www.missioalliance.org/author/mandysmith/

Christianity Today:
https://www.christianitytoday.com/pastors/contributors/mandy-smith.html

Books:
http://www.ivpress.com/cgi-ivpress/book.pl/code=4123

https://www.amazon.com/Unfettered-Imagining-Childlike-Baggage-Western/dp/1587435055/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=unfettered+smith&qid=1603995828&sr=8-1

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Christian preachers dare to talk about God.

- Karl Barth

Our friend, mentor, and muse, Will Willimon, is back on the podcast to talk with Dr. Johanna (she's got a crush on him), Teer, and Jason about his new book, Preachers Dare: Speaking for God.

Mining Karl Barth's maxim from the Gottingen Dogmatics that "Preachers dare," Willimon offers a wily dissent from homiletics understood as a human endeavor. Plus, the book is dedicated to the team at C&GJ!

Plus, the attempt at an intro from Dr. J is worth the episode.

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Delvyn Case III is a composer, conductor, scholar, performer, concert producer, and Professor of Music at Wheaton College of Massachusetts.

As a professional musician he works as a composer, conductor, and pianist, equally at home in the worlds of classical and popular music. As a church musician he's worked in virtually every context and every genre. He's conducted major works like Handel’s Messiah, led an 80-voice gospel choir, played organ at Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, and UCC churches, and played keyboard on praise teams at many Evangelical churches.

As a composer, he's written a symphony, an oratorio, an opera about anti-Semitism, and chamber and vocal pieces which have been performed by Grammy-winning artists Richard Stoltzman and the Chestnut Brass Company, among many others. Much of my concert music explores themes from the Christian tradition. He's also written pieces for educational outreach concerts, which have been heard by over 10,000 children across the world. But his most popular piece is his holiday overture Rocket Sleigh, which been performed by over 80 orchestras in the US, UK, and Europe.

In 2019 Delvyn founded Deus Ex Musica, a unique ecumenical organization that promotes the use of sacred music for learning and spiritual growth. Among their projects is the Deus Ex Musica Podcast in which interview Christian musicians working in various genres about how their faith impacts their work.

You can find his blog for Patheos: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/alleluiamusicandthechristianlife/

His website:
http://delvyn-case.squarespace.com

Deus Ex Musica:
https://www.deus-ex-musica.com

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"In their language of warfare spiritual and secular, Trump’s evangelical allies have been playing with a fire that may continue to burn long after they give up this contest...History is a wasteland of religious justifications for political activism, identity, and violence. On the other hand, Christianity, and American Christianity especially, has arguably possessed more than its fair share of these unions of political thought and religious belief."

Our friend Thomas Lecaque is back on the podcast to talk about his latest article at The Bulwark (you really should subscribe to it) entitled, "Spiritual Warriors on Behalf of Donald Trump:
Putting the recent rhetoric of some of the president’s evangelical supporters in historical context."

Thomas Lecaque is a professor of history at Grand View University. If you've not yet moved to Parler, you can follow him on Twitter: @tlecaque

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Our guest for episode #284 is Dr. Jerusha Matsen Neal, Professor of Homiletics at Duke. I had looked forward to talking with her. I left our conversation feeling grateful and delighted. I hope you enjoy it.

A graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, Dr. Neal shares connections and affinities with a number of friends from the podcast, including Beverly Gaventa, James Kay, and Karl Barth.

Her new book is The Overshadowed Preacher: Mary, the Spirit, and the Labor of Proclamation. It breaks open one of the most important, unexamined affirmations of preaching: the presence of the living Christ in the sermon.

Jerusha Matsen Neal argues that Mary’s conceiving, bearing, and naming of Jesus in Luke’s nativity account is a potent description of this mystery. Mary’s example calls preachers to leave behind the false shadows haunting Christian pulpits and be “overshadowed” by the Spirit of God.

Neal asks gospel proclaimers to own both the limits and the promise of their humanness as God’s Spirit-filled servants rather than disappear behind a “pulpit prince” ideal. It is a preacher’s fully embodied witness, lived out through Spirit-filled acts of hospitality, dependence, and discernment, that bears the marks of a fully embodied Christ. This affirmation honors the particularity of preachers in a globally diverse context—challenging a status quo that has historically privileged masculinity and whiteness. It also offers hope to ordinary souls who find themselves daunted by the impossibility of the preaching task. Nothing, in the angel’s words, is impossible with God.

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Our dear friend of the podcast and overall muse, Fleming Rutledge called in to offer a prayer for Election Day. As are all her prayers, this one is special.

Fleming is the author of many books including "The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ." You can find her at www.generousorthodoxy.org.

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Jason, Teer, and Taylor had a conversation with Gretchen Purser about the changes to the Republican Party throughout her career.

“’Trump says all the things we’ve always wanted to say.’ Really? Then what does it say about us as Americans if Trump’s outer monologue is our inner monologue?”

Our guest for episode #282 is former Republican campaign operative and fundraiser, Gretchen Purser.

Raised a conservative Baptist in Oklahoma, Gretchen retired in 2009 from a 20 year career in politics, raising over a billion dollars for the Republican Party, candidates, and causes. She worked for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Christian Coalition during the 1996 Presidential Campaign, the President's Dinner, George W Bush's Inaugural. As an RNC consultant and finance director, Gretchen oversaw the McCain Victory finance team as well as the Bush finance team in the 2008 campaign.

Donald Trump's Republican Party is NOT her party nor is it the Pro Life, Character Counts, Christian Values party for which she worked for two decades, and she's on the podcast to share her concern and righteous indignation.

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"Rather than resorting to Luther's Law-Gospel binary to excuse the Presidents mendacity and self-justify support for him, Protestants should turn to Luther's theology of cross which tells us that we should call a thing what it is...and the thing is only God knows the details and depths of Donald Trump's spiritual life, but Jesus says what comes out of our mouths is the fruit of what's in our hearts, and what Trump routinely says publicly disavows every core teaching Jesus set forth in the Sermon on the Mount."

Our guest is Heidi Neumark, an author and Lutheran pastor in the South Bronx. Her new book is Sanctuary: Being Christian in the Wake of Trump.

Throughout her nearly forty years in ministry, Heidi Neumark has strived to make communities of faith into sanctuaries amid the turmoils of life. Now, with the social and political upheaval of the years since Donald Trump was elected president, Neumark believes the true Christian calling is to live out a counterpoint to today’s prevailing spirits of exclusion and hatred. Using her own bilingual, multicultural congregation as a model, she moves through the seasons of the church calendar to reflect on what it looks like to live out essential Christian convictions in community with others.

Sanctuary is an amplifier for the many voices crying out against policies and rhetoric that are cruel, dehumanizing, and dangerous. Neumark begins each chapter with a quote from Donald Trump that she defies and dismantles with the power of her own stories—anecdotes about offering shelter for queer youth in her city, supporting immigrants and asylum-seekers being harassed by ICE, and embracing her church’s diversity with a Guadalupe celebration, to name a few. Timely, but also timeless, this book speaks to the deep wounds of this era, inflicted before and during the Trump presidency, which will remain long past its end.

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"You are mortal. You are not indispensable to the world. Your life will come to an end. We're not heroes of the world and we can't do much. To what and to whom do we give ourselves in this short life? Lacking a journalistic account of the future leaves us with many unanswered questions: What will 'do' in heaven? What exactly will it feel like and look like? My most basic answer to questions like these is "I don't know." Our hope rests not in a speculative vision of the future but in God and his promise."

With COVID having claimed over 200K lives and All Saints approaching, our guest is J. Todd Billings, Professor of Reformed Theology at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan. Living with incurable cancer, Billings reflects upon the end in his new book, The End of the Christian Life: How Embracing Mortality Frees Us to Truly Live.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit crackersnjuice.substack.com/subscribe